Review: A little over a year ago my mom and I found out that my first bone graft failed and I all my hope felt like it had been sucked out of me. Since then I went through another surgery in June of 2012 to do another bone graft, but a little different process.
Then in October, I went in for a CT scan to see how the bone had grown and my doctor said there was as much bone as I could possibly grow, but not quite enough. Like always, my doctor's brilliance came up with a back up plan. Dr. Dierks said he could take a piece of my lower jaw bone and screw it into the upper jaw to fill in the space. This would be a 2-3 month recovery to get me back to fully opening my jaw, and in 7-10 years the bone would he would remove would be fully grown back into place. Everything sounded good, after all it was an option I had to take if I wanted to move forward. That or my bone had 3 weeks to grow more... (have a little faith).
The piece planned to take from the lower jaw to put into my upper jaw
On November 4th I went up to Legacy Emanuel once again with my mom (the greatest and strongest mom I know :)). My surgery got pushed back to 9:30 but we still had to be there by 7:30! Early morning for us! We got there and I got all prepped for surgery. I can handle everything about a surgery except the IV. That is the worst part for me, luckily last time after the first attempt the nurse allowed us to have the anesthesiologist put it in while I was asleep. This time we remembered this and requested that before any attempts. So it was a pretty relaxing start. At Legacy Emanuel they have a chaplain who goes around to pray with different patients that request it, this time we didn't request to have one since my mom and dad both prayed me up before my surgery...but nonetheless a chaplain came in. It wasn't until later that we found out that Dr. Dierks likes to have the chaplain pray with his patients because for some reason whenever he prays over Dr. Dierks's patients the surgeries always go better ;)
We got into the pre-op room where all the different doctors and nurses came in to introduce themselves and go over surgery procedure and make sure I understand everything. Dr. Dierks came in and said that he had 3 plans, 1st plan was if in a perfect world then I would have enough bone and he could go in and place 3-5 dental implant bases into my upper jaw, plan 2 assuming there wasn't enough bone he would take the piece from my lower jaw as well as remove my lower wisdom teeth and scrape the bone from the sockets of my wisdom teeth and screw it all into my upper jaw. Plan 3 wasn't exactly a plan but more of just if for some reason both of those plans didn't work or there wasn't enough bone around then he would just have to make something up as he went along. After that I was taken into the O.R. where I was hooked up to different monitors and was soon put out by a gas mask. My surgery was blocked out for 3 hours due to all the steps of removing and placing bone and implants into different locations.
After an hour and a half or so my doctor came out to my mom to tell her how the surgery went. My mom was taken by surprise by how fast it was. Dr. Dierks came back with news we weren't expecting at all! It turned out that within the last few weeks before my surgery more bone grew and I didn't have to go through getting bone grafted from more places. Some would say that was lucky but I say and believe it was a miracle. Since I had just enough bone to put the bases in my doctor placed 3 into my jaw. I didn't have enough to fully support 5 so he did the minimal of 3.
I was still in the post op room while all this was happening and it took me quite a while to wake up. I started to come to and they had an oxygen mask on my face and then I fell back asleep again and later I had the oxygen tubes that go up the nose. It was a little uncomfortable but for the first time I was super itchy. Turns out it had to do with the hospital gown and how clean they make them. The nurse gave me benadryl to help with the itching but the side effect was putting me back to sleep...this went on for a while and my mom had to try to get me to wake up but I was super cranky and didn't want to wake up. We eventually got out of there and the nurses after seeing our history there let us do our own thing and not have to follow all the checklist items before they discharged me. We were on the road to home by that afternoon!
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We didn't get many pictures this surgery but my mom thought it would be funny to put the oxygen mask on my bear :) This is Jojo and he goes to every surgery with me. He is my most favorite bear!
Since then I have recovered very fast and I am on a very soft food diet until March when I will hopefully have another surgery to place the teeth. Until then my prayer request is that my body will accept the metal implants. Often the bone will reject the implants and that is where this step could fail. So we are praying that it doesn't! I go in to the doctor's office on November 20th to do a check up and remove the remaining sutchers in my mouth. Hopefully then everything will look great!
Within a year and half I have learned what it truly means to have faith. To have faith doesn't mean to rely on God and trust in Him when everything in life is going your way or when everything is falling into place, but to have faith is to rely on God and trust Him when things are falling a part. When times are hard, and trusting seems like the hardest thing to do, because it is. Having faith also can be taken advantage of, you can become so relaxed in just believing everything will fall into place that when it doesn't the world seems as if it just blew up in your face. That was me in 2011. I became so comfortable that all my surgeries would continue to go as I always planned them in my head, and then God threw a curve ball. Totally legal play but I wasn't expecting it and I didn't want it, and instead of taking it I broke down and gave up. Looking back to it all now I'm glad it happened, well not that I was set back in months for being done but that I was able to learn a huge lesson.
In the 2 weeks prior to my surgery nearly every day there was either a verse or a song that came up about faith. It was as if God was telling me every day just to have faith in Him to fully FULLY trust in Him. Finally I understood and I did it. I fully trusted him, at that same time little did I know the bone in my jaw was growing. Growing enough to make the upcoming surgery that much less invasive. In a perfect world there would be enough bone, but in my world with a little bit of faith there would be enough bone.
Matthew 17:20... "Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Throughout the day remember to have a little faith, you never know far it will take you.
